When the Detroit Lions announce the next player cuts to get to Tuesday’s deadline of 85 players, don’t expect Jahlani Tavai’s name to be among them. But it should be, for the better of all parties involved.
Tavai struggled through his first two seasons in Detroit for a variety of reasons. Many of them are not his fault, from his draft status to the prior coaching regime’s insistence he bulk up to 270 pounds as an off-ball linebacker.
Those hindrances are now gone. He looks great in his slimmed-down physique, and the coaching and scheme clearly suit him (and the whole team) better. Yet Tavai still fails to look like he belongs on an NFL field even in a preseason game. And he failed because of reasons he can control.
The hope with Tavai was that the sleeker body would make him quicker and faster. Those are mutually exclusive traits. Alas, neither really improved other than his straight-line speed, and that is not something an inside linebacker utilizes very often. The lack of quickness is the primary issue, at least physically.
Tavai’s 2019-2020 game film is littered with examples of his lack of lateral agility and foot quickness keeping him from making a play. There were two specific instances of the same issue happening on Friday night against Buffalo. He sees where he needs to be and tries, but the combination of quickness and speed to close to the point of attack just aren’t good enough. His lack of quickness literally got in the way of teammate Austin Bryant and cost the Lions a tackle-for-loss opportunity on one of the plays.
Then there’s the mental quickness, a critical trait for a linebacker. Tavai just doesn’t process the information he’s seeing into action quickly enough. Unfortunately, this is something that still rears its ugly head in nearly every practice in Allen Park. It definitely did in Ford Field on Friday, too.
Safety Will Harris has the same issue, but Harris — like Tavai a 2019 prospect woefully overdrafted by the Lions — at least has the speed and athleticism to compensate. He too will wait too long to react, but Harris is such a good athlete that he can make it work. And he’s been doing a better job in his third summer with the team, enough that there might be a successful salvage story with Will Harris in Detroit.
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It’s not going to happen for Tavai. Anyone who watches practice knows it. The linebacking corps around him is much better now with the additions of rookie Derrick Barnes and underappreciated vet Shaun Dion Hamilton, both of whom are behind free agent Alex Anzalone. Tavai isn’t beating out any of them for the off-ball LB spot next to Jamie Collins, who has been consistently great in camp before his sleepwalking performance on Friday night. He’s not as big of an asset on special teams as Jalen Reeves-Maybin or Anthony Pittman, each of whom has also outshined Tavai at LB on the practice field most of the time, too.
It’s sad that it didn’t work for Tavai in Detroit. I liked him as a prospect coming out of Hawaii and thought that he could be a real asset, even if he was selected a little higher than he should have been. He’s a good person, a great teammate and gives his best all the time. Tavai has never been anything but gracious and giving to the fans even though they’ve largely loathed him from the get-go.
Alas, Tavai’s best just isn’t good enough for the new-look Lions. It’s time to let him try and prove himself with another team, and cutting him right away maximizes that chance.